STEP 3 Format the volume on the instance

To be able to use the volume we will first need to format it. I will use ext4 as my filesystem. There are also other filesystems to choose from. My instance was attached on /dev/vdb, so that is the block device I need to format. Replace /dev/vdb with the device your volume is attached to.

This is harmless and can be ignored. If you want to get rid off it, you can add the hostname to /etc/hosts:$ echo "127.0.0.1 test-instance" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

STEP 4 Mount the volume

The volume is attached to our instance and we have formatted it. Before we can use it we need to mount it. If you do not have experience with mounting filesystems in Linux, Ubuntu has a good explanation.We need to make a mountpoint to mount our volume in:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/test-volume

We are going to add this mountpoint to /etc/fstab, so it will be mounted automatically on startup. Do this using your favorite editor. Mine is vim.

$ sudo vim /etc/fstab

And add this line to the end of the file:

/dev/vdb /mnt/test-volume ext4 defaults 0 0

Save and close (How to exit Vim). This will automatically mount the volume at startup, but we still need to mount it manually now:

$ sudo mount /mnt/test-volume

This will mount the volume. Any data you now save to /mnt/test-volume will be stored on the volume.